Wednesday, December 12, 2012

Wrong

Look, we can probably sit around and make fun of Doug Saunders all day, but the fact remains that he's a respected journalist at the country's most venerable newspaper who not only wrote something patently ridiculous, but he made a whole book out of it and continues wandering our media byways defending the whole damn bucket of stupid.

That said, my friend (and editor) Paul Tuns of The Interimpretty much summed up why Saunders has gotten it so wrong, pretty much from the moment he drew breath to speak:

Doug Saunders, author of The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West?, writes about why he wrote the book in this week's edition of The Hill Times: "Culture is something that's a product of economic and educational circumstances. It's not a cause. It's an effect ... In many ways, this book is sort of a corrective of that misunderstanding." I think there are three arguments to be made about the interconnection of culture, economics, education, and much more (technology, laws, religion, etc...) and Saunders has accepted as true the one that is almost certainly wrong. The other possibilities are that culture is cause for what happens in economics and education or that these factors continuously play upon each other. I think the constant playing upon each other is the right description.

That's pretty much the whole of Paul's post on the subject, and it needs to be repeated and circulated, to give folks who might be fooled some sort of idea of the resonant, earth-shattering foolishness that underlies Saunders' book.

And no - no Amazon link to the book. You know where to find the thing - I just don't want to make it any easier for you.